- Over 90 million people across Eastern and Southern Africa face acute hunger. Some areas have been enduring their worst ever recorded drought.
- Southern Africa, already drought-prone, was devastated with roughly 1/6th of the population (68 million) needing food aid in August 2024.
- In Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, maize and wheat crops have failed repeatedly. In Zimbabwe alone, the 2024 corn crop was down 70% year on year, and maize prices doubled while 9,000 cattle died of thirst and starvation.
- In Somalia, the government estimated 43,000 people died in 2022 alone due to drought-linked hunger. As of early 2025, 4.4 million people – a quarter of the population – face crisis-level food insecurity, including 784,000 expected to reach emergency levels.
- Zambia suffered one of the world's worst energy crises as the Zambezi River in April 2024 plummeted to 20% of its long-term average. The country’s largest hydroelectric plant, the Kariba Dam, fell to 7% generation capacity, causing blackouts of up to 21 hours per day and shuttering hospitals, bakeries, and factories.
- Spain: Water shortages hit agriculture, tourism, and domestic supply. By September 2023, two years of drought and record heat caused a 50% drop in Spain’s olive crop, causing its olive oil prices to double across the country.
- Morocco: The sheep population was 38% smaller in 2025 relative to 2016, prompting a royal plea to cancel traditional Eid sacrifices.
- Türkiye: Drought accelerated groundwater depletion, triggering sinkholes that present hazards to communities and their infrastructure while permanently reducing aquifer storage capacity.
- Amazon Basin: Record-low river levels in 2023 and 2024 led to mass deaths of fish and endangered dolphins, and disrupted drinking water and transport for hundreds of thousands. As deforestation and fires intensify, the Amazon risks transitioning from a carbon sink to a carbon source.
- Panama Canal: Water levels dropped so low that transits were slashed by over one-third (from 38 to 24 ships daily between October 2023 and January 2024), causing major global trade disruptions. Facing multi-week delays, many ships were rerouted to longer, costlier paths via the Suez Canal or South Africa’s infamous Cape of Good Hope. Among the knock-on effects, U.S. soybean exports slowed, and UK grocery stores reported shortages and rising prices of fruits and vegetables.
- Drought disrupted production and supply chains of key crops such as rice, coffee, and sugar. In 2023-2024, dry conditions in Thailand and India, for example, triggered shortages leading to a 8.9% increase in the price of sugar and sweets in the US.
“A Perfect Storm” of El Niño and climate change
The 2023–2024 El Niño event amplified already harsh climate change impacts, triggering dry conditions across major agricultural and ecological zones. Drought’s impacts hit hardest in climate hotspots, regions already suffering from warming trends, population pressures, and fragile infrastructure.
“This was a perfect storm,” says report co-author Dr. Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC Assistant Director and drought impacts researcher. “El Niño added fuel to the fire of climate change, compounding the effects for many vulnerable societies and ecosystems past their limits.”
Co-author Dr. Cody Knutson, who oversees NDMC drought planning research, underlined a recent OECD estimate that a drought episode today carries an economic cost at least twice as high as in 2000, with a 35% to 110% increase projected by 2035.
“Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks,” she adds. “No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse.”
Between 2010 to 2019, the US armed forces pumped out 636 million metric tons of CO2. Though annual emissions declined from roughly 76 million metric tons in 2010 to about 55 million by the end of the decade, the American armed forces still generate more CO2 than most countries.
This massive carbon footprint is the byproduct of a sprawling global operation. All in all, the US has 900 domestic bases and installations, as well as nearly 800 international bases and smaller military installations dotted around the world.
Bear in mind that the US isn’t the biggest military by number of soldiers. Both China and India, two countries with populations over 1 billion, have more soldiers, but the US spends significantly more on its military and appears to require more energy to maintain itself.
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000569
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